aboriginality; not without good show of reason;
for the Murzthal, is even more beautiful, and
more original in dun and grey, with reddish-tipped
ears, than our favourite Schwitz.
These three breeds—Alderney, Schwitz, and
Murzthal, with their sub-varieties,
Oberhasli, Undertewald Pinzgau, and Montafon,
cannot be improved by any cross on this side
of the water. Their destiny is to make, not
good beef, but rich butter.

In the neglect of meat lies the chief
difference between British and foreign agriculture.
Under all circumstances, meat is
the ultimate and early destination of our live
stock. It is the object of which our stock
owners never lose sight. On the continent,
horned cattle are valued for the dairy, for their
hides, and for their usefulness in the cart or
the plough. Even milch-cows are put into
harness. The Comte de Jourdonnet, a French
agricultural critic, contemplates with horror
the English bovine alliance, lest it should,
corrupting the French docility, give French
cattle a sort of Bourbonite obesity, unpleasing
to the Parisian table; and, in sacrificing
oxen and cows to the butcher, make them
above their business as drawers of ploughs
and carts: a very unnecessary fear, the result
of the prejudice that dreads ploughboys
becoming too learned. Foreign sheep are, or
rather were until lately, considered only in
a woolly point of view; chops, cutlets, and
gigots having been secondary considerations;
haunches and saddles unknown. As for pigs,
although lard is an export, there seem to be
millions bred for the sole use of saddlers and
brush-makers, in defiance of all established
rules for manufacturing streaky flitches, or
of that fat bacon of which a lump enclosed
in the heart of a cabbage, bound in a net,
and properly boiled, makes a dish fit for an
emperor.

Although in England particularly in
Herefordshire, Devonshire, and Sussex — oxen are
used to plough; although in one county you
find great dairies of the hardy red Devons;
in another of the delicate Ayrshire, and more
frequently cattle of no particular breed but
well dashed with the flesh-gathering short-
horn—here making butter, there making
cheese, and, near the great cities, supplying
milk and cream only; yet, all the varieties are
specially bred and fed with the view of making
large, round, juicy joints. This object is so
well attained by dint of years of pains, that
the roan, white-nosed, half-bred cow, not quite
so thick in the hide as a rhinoceros, after a
few years' duty at such a dairyfarm as Friern
Manor, near London, or Liscard, near Liverpool,
is able, with a few months use and feeding,
to meet the notabilities of the London
cattle market in a condition of velvety plumpness
that would put the best ox in the Parisian
abattoirs to the blush. Such are the results
of proper breeding and careful education.

One row of stalls given up to Hungary and
Gallicia, under the charge of herds as
handsomely and more usefully costumed than our
cavalry, presented an idea of the original
condition in which agriculture was left after the
avatar of the Huns. A pair of buffalos and a
leash of white, lean, long-legged, active, elk-
like cattle, with monstrous spiral horns were
there to represent a country; where, for want of
roads or markets, flocks and herds, in a half-wild
unimproved state, are watched by
horsemen and shepherds, scarcely more
civilised than the plaided highlanders who
bred black cattle and levied black mail on
the lowlands a hundred and fifty years ago.

In the present condition of Hungary and
Gallicia these white cattle are invaluable.
They live on anything, and trot along a wild
moor track as fast as horses, where no horses
could go. The Austrian professor who wrote
a report on these strange oriental beasts,—
which doubtless came with the Hungarians
from Asia— is eloquent on the flavour of their
flesh. No doubt, what there is of it, is excellent ;
but there must be considerably less on
a fatted ox of this Pustenvich breed, than on
a well-fed red-deer. Yet these were, to the
student of agricultural history, perhaps the
most interesting classes in the exhibition.
They were cattle-marks, to coin a word, showing
where a rich unbroken wilderness began.

For, if we stepped away a few yards we
came to the Scotch department ; where,
peacefully feeding, were to be found long
rows of hornless black cattle, the polled
Angus — square solid cubes of flesh without
dint or angle — exciting the loud admiration
of French and all foreign breeders and
butchers, to whom the race-Angus was as
new, as the white antelope-horned Pustenvich.

Few were able to understand how a
grand lesson in politics and political economy
is to be learned from those polled cattle
and their fellow countrymen, the shaggy-
coated, long-horned West-highlanders. A
hundred and fifty years ago, the lands and
the population among which these perfect
specimens of beefmaking cattle are now bred,
were in a condition more barbarous than
any part of Hungary and Gallicia. Such
angular and large-boned cattle ; bred, fed,
starved, on the mountains and damp rush-
covered valleys, were originally stunted in
size and shape, by cold and hunger. The
people — without commerce, without roads,
isolated by language from the Lowlands,
divided among themselves by a thousand
feuds — scratched the soil with a rude spade,
or a ruder plough, to grow a few oats
near their miserable huts ; and, on these,
with the produce of lean cattle sold at low-
land fairs, and the salted flesh of a worn-
out cow, or sheep, or goat, they managed
to exist with the help of salmon from the
stream, and deer from the forest. But, by
degrees, the influence of a free and stable
government was extended to the most
remote parts of Scotland. The sword of